The Creating the Countryside exhibition features Anna Fox and Alison Goldfrapp’s Untitled from their Country Girls series.
Photograph: Hyman Collection

Images of a green and pleasant land with a sinister undertone – where lambs gambol but a corpse might lie under a nearby hedge – feature in an exhibition examining Britain’s relationship with the countryside.

The show at Compton Verney gallery in Warwickshire sets the scene with a small 1645 sketch by Claude Lorrain of a beautiful vista, charming ruin, mannerly animals and a picturesque peasant boy. It shows how centuries later the vision still seeps into everyday life, from pictures on beer bottle labels to air fresheners.

As well as idyllic views by JMW Turner, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough, the exhibition includes a Midsomer Murders souvenir tea tray, a vase by Grayson Perry of villagers jostling to watch a woman in Victorian attire being taken away in a police van, and an ominously brilliantly coloured photograph by Anna Fox of a pair of feet in scarlet high heels in a green ditch.

“There’s just something apparently endlessly seductive about the idea that beneath all this lovely greenery, something evil lurks,” said the curator, Verity Elson.

Joint curator Rosemary Shirley, of Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “We want to preserve this ideal of peace and solitude, but at some level it also induces anxiety.”

She has contributed a unique collection of air fresheners, whose creators boasted of capturing the essence of English national parks. The Lake District fragrance is described as “midnight, berry and shimmering mist”, and the Peak District is “golden lilies and spring breeze”. “Actually I live very near the pub,” Shirley said, “so when I open the window what I mostly smell is chips.”

The Compton Verney is set in an Arcadian fantasy, a mansion by a lake in what appears to be idyllic countryside with cows grazing by a rippling stream. However, it is a careful construct by the most famous landscape designer of the 18th century, Capability Brown, involving moving a village and flooding a valley.

Mist rises over Compton Verney, home to a gallery and Georgian mansion set in parkland landscaped by Capability Brown. Photograph: VisitEngland/Compton Verney

“Many visitors assume this is quintessential English countryside, unchanged for centuries,” said the gallery’s director, Steven Parissien. “In fact absolutely everything you see is manmade.”

Another project at Compton Verney this month is The Clearing, a “living, breathing encampment” built in the parkland grounds of the former stately home, where some 21st-century ornamental hermits will spend the next seven months as residents. The geodesic dome – the futuristic housing solution beloved of 1960s hippies – was built from salvaged and donated materials, including packing crates for Rolls-Royce airplane nose cones by the artists Tom James and Alex Hartley.

Anna Bennett, who will move in on Monday, the first of 40 people chosen from 160 applicants, is interested in solar technology, which is handy as the lighting rig has just failed.

The hermits are permitted “alcohol in moderation”, but it is bad news for anyone expecting newly laid eggs for breakfast: the chickens do not arrive until June.

The dome has a composting toilet in a separate shed, but that proved a retro step too far for the planning authority – the hermits will be expected to walk 200 metres to the loos in the visitors’ centre.

The dome, built on a platform overhanging the lake after the curators won planning permission for three years in the Grade II-listed landscape, is described as “part school, part shelter and part folly” – seen as partly an echo of the eye-catcher ruined abbeys and castles with which Capability Brown studded his landscapes, partly a genuine experiment in living off-grid and partly a horrible warning.